The Woman Who Chose to Plant Corn

Not long ago, a Diné (Navajo) friend of mine,
Lyla June Johnston, sent me a one-line
e-mail: “I am not going to Harvard….
I am going to plant corn.”
Her statement signals a profound divergence from the
path she’d set out on when she was an undergraduate at
Stanford University. She is choosing instead to learn the
lifeways of her culture, to become fluent in her language,
to relearn traditional skills, to be intimate with the land.
The dominant American culture does not encourage
such a path.

We’d talked about it before, her decision to take
a prestigious graduate course at Harvard. The usual
themes came up: the doors that might be opened, the
credibility that might be turned toward a good cause.
I remember observing how common it is to adopt the
values and mindsets of the environment in which one
is immersed—to become a creature of the very system
one sets out to subvert. We appreciated the toxicity of
the story: “See, a Native American woman can make it
big, too, and go to Harvard.” Toxic, because it celebrates
the very same system of status and privilege that has
marginalized the worldview, culture and value system
she comes from.

It is often said that people like Lyla are role models
for others of like background. Role models for what,
though? For being bribed into complicity with the oppressor?
For joining the world-devouring machine? For
sacrificing local relationships and culture to the melting
pot? Certainly, Lyla could rise high in the world symbolized
by Harvard; she could become a professor herself
one day, teaching young people anti-colonialist thinking.
Nonetheless, all that instruction would be happening
within a container—a classroom inside a course inside
an elite university inside a system of higher education—
that implicitly contradicts all she would want to teach.
Her students would be thinking, “Sure, but in the end she
is benefiting from the system too.”

Then there was the matter of a Harvard degree opening
doors. The question is, doors to what? To be sure,
many people today are more likely to listen to a native
woman who also happens to be a Harvard Ph.D. than to
one who “only plants corn.” The door to the prestigious
conferences, the think tanks, the halls of power would
be closed. (Or so it would seem. Actually there are back
doors to such places.) And that would be a shame—
if indeed such places constituted the fulcrum of change
in our society, if indeed such places are where the important
things are happening. Certainly, what is happening
on Wall Street and in Washington is more important than
anything that goes on in a cornfield, right? Certainly, it is
the people of talent and worth that get to rise to positions
of power, and those of lesser gifts and lower cultural
development who must settle for the fields, the hearth,
the humble realms, right?

Wrong. What we see as the locus of power in the
world is an illusion, born of the theory of change that
our cultural beliefs dictate. It is one kind of revolution
to enter the halls of power with the intent to turn them
against themselves; to (paraphrasing the Caribbean-
American writer Audre Lorde) use the master’s tools
to dismantle the master’s house. It is a deeper kind of
revolution to recognize the limitations of those tools,
and to know that change might originate in the people
and places we have seen as powerless. Lyla and the many
people I meet like her no longer believe that the smart
people at Harvard and Yale are going to find the answers
and fix the world; therefore, they no longer seek admission
to the elite club of world-fixers.

Lyla’s decision is also a sign of changing times. In past
generations there were a few who overcame inconceivable
obstacles to go to college, to make it in the White Man’s
world. Their presence there was an affront to a ruling ideology
that considered them part of an inferior race. Their
achievements helped to unravel that story, both in the eyes
of white people and, more importantly, in the eyes of those
of their own culture they inspired. Today, though, elite
institutions salivate over people like Lyla, because their
presence buttresses a new, more insidious story: a story
of “equal opportunity” and “diversity” that obscures the
ongoing systemic oppression of minorities, and ignores
the demolition and absorption of their cultures into the
dominant monoculture.

I am not saying there is not important work to be done
within the institutions of power. I am only saying that
such work is no more urgent than the work that older
cultural frames validate, but that ours does not. Nor
would I condemn anyone who chooses to work within the
system. Some of us have gifts that are well suited to that
work. But let us not overvalue what goes on in the halls of
power; let us not blindly adopt the metrics of success that
the establishment offers. It may very well be that a sense
of purpose, play and life keeps you in the system—or it
could be its ubiquitous bribes and threats. We can all tell
the difference when we are honest with ourselves.

Who can know the effects of the story of The Woman
Who Chose to Plant Corn? What I do know is that such
choices operate levers of power that are invisible to our
culture’s Story of the World. They invite synchronicity
and induce the unexpected. They bring us to places we
didn’t know existed. They create movement in a new
direction, whereas abiding by the conventions of the
dominant system merely adds to its inertia.

We are done with a world in which the logic of power
is more important than the corn. When enough people
live by that, the powerful will make different choices as
well, acting in their role as barometers and channels of
collective consciousness.

Please do not mistake Lyla’s choice for an exercise
in ideological purity, as if she wished to avoid the taint
of power. A better explanation is that she knows that
Harvard is not where the action is. There are other paths
to walk that are no less important, and it is crucial that
someone walk them. I see more and more young people
seeking them out today, from within the dominant
culture and from its margins. They are walking out of
our civilization’s Story of the World; some are not even
entering it.

The best and brightest are abandoning the ship,
and even those who remain aboard are participating
half-heartedly as they sense the inevitable shipwreck.
Eventually even going through the motions of complicity
becomes intolerable, as our hunger to live a
meaningful life draws us towards a new and ancient
story of interconnection, interbeing, and social, personal
and ecological healing. Yet few of us are free of the
programming of our youth, our indoctrination into the
values of the system; therefore our exit can be messy,
subject to hesitation, relapses and diversions. As Lyla
told me more recently, “While I know intellectually why
I am doing this, I am still so brainwashed it is hard to
really know it from my body.”

When I say I hope that many others follow Lyla’s
example, I do not mean to offer her as an ideal of impeccable
integrity. Like many of us, she has no map to follow
into this uncharted territory of our civilization’s transition;
she has only a compass and, if my own experience
is any guide, it is a wobbly one at that. It points towards
a healed and just world, and guides us into its service.
When enough of us follow it, however imperfectly, we
will cut new trails leading out of the maze that entraps
our civilization.